


Slip Like The Stars Into Oblivion

by Eisenschrott



Series: The OT3 That Never Was [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Canon-Typical Violence, Eliana Veers (OC) mentioned, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Loneliness, Maximilian Veers mentioned, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-27 21:38:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15033854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eisenschrott/pseuds/Eisenschrott
Summary: After the war, two ex-Imperials meet on a distant planet. One is estranged from his family, the other has found a new one to belong to.





	Slip Like The Stars Into Oblivion

Zev’s hands lost their grip on the bottle. He flinched, but the bottle was already empty; no loss of brandy. So he let his shoulders sag and his head hang on his chest again.

The bottle rolled uninterrupted off his knees and tumbled down; it floated on the water between his bare feet for a few wave crests. It was beautiful to measure time in waves. Bobbing in and out of the water, the bottle disappeared under the pier.

Zev peered down. His body nearly tilted over and he grabbed onto the edge of the pier. Blast, he kept forgetting about Savareen’s gravity, his own physical mass, and the brandy’s impact on his sense of balance.

“Two, six—heave.” He pulled himself backwards and flopped spread-eagled on the salt-sprayed planks of the pier, legs dangling over the edge, eyes closed.

Why was he here anyway? Ah, yes, swim into the open sea and drown. That was the original plan. The liquid courage had made him too tipsy to carry it out. He’d have to take off his clothes, and right now he wouldn’t trust himself to open the fly of his trousers. Pity. He would try a soberer time.

The sun cooked him inside his homespun clothes, scalded his bare face where the older burns had barely healed. He hadn’t thought of packing sunscreen when he deserted; the villagers sometimes gave him a poultice that cooled the burns, but he kept forgetting to ask for more as soon as he ran out of stock.

A gentle breeze wafted from the sea, stroking his sun-burned cheeks like a distant, maternal hand. Under the wooden planks, the waves broke in lazy splashes against the pillars. Far away into the low rumble of the ocean, a lone sea eagle squawked to a prey that wouldn’t let itself be caught. Or to a reluctant mate. Zev just couldn’t pick up the differences in the local birdsong. And he rooted for the prey, in any case. “Swim away, fish,” he murmured. Moving his lips and tongue made him taste a leftover brandy flavor, mixed with that of sea salt and the blood from a sore on his chapped upper lip.

Thunder rumbled in the distance. A long thunder, _too_ long, rolling closer and louder. A starship engine. Zev pressed his eyes closed. Draped an arm over his face when he recognized the whirr of a Lambda shuttle. The shadow and the apparent wind gusted above him, the engine sound so loud it made the planks tremble—or was he trembling?

It rumbled past, towards the landing pad.

He muttered a prayer in Hrönir to Yllagim, the keeper of the past, so that she may shelter his own in secrecy and safety, locked in her coffer at the bottom of the sea. He hoped it made no difference on which planet the sea was. Only then did he dare look. He had to sit up, shield his eyes with a hand, and squint. Indeed, a Lambda-class Imperial shuttle had just landed. Blast-scorched all over the inward-folded fins.

The ramp lowered and bipedal figures that looked nothing like stormtroopers or greybacks hobbled down, getting used to the planet’s gravity. Zev couldn’t see them clearly, as squinting made his eyes flutter in an attempt to just close for good; but at least one of the newcomers had too many horns to be a Human.

The shuttle must be a spoil of war, or stolen Imperial property. Perhaps they were Rebels. “Rebels,” he told himself aloud. He had been dreaming of this moment his whole adolescence long, and now that it may be coming true, his heart didn’t even beat faster.

His eyes wandered back off to the sea. The breeze had steadied into a constant wind, and risen in intensity so that the sunlight wasn’t so hot anymore. Far off over the horizon, the clouds were as grey as a Star Destroyer’s interior. Zev had no idea if that meant a storm was brewing.

Out of the blue, his stomach twinged. He bent over on all fours just in time for the floodgates to spill a leak of undigested brandy into the sea. Inside his mouth, the sores of previous benders were ripped open afresh; he panted with his mouth wide open, the air offering no relief to the acidic burning.

Someone patted on his shoulder. He looked up through a sheen of tears, recognized the village woman first, and the object in her extended hand second: a water canteen. Zev signed a quick and likely incorrect _thank you_ , snatched the canteen and rinsed his mouth a few times with the clear, blessedly cool water. He drank up the rest of it, not enough to quench the water thirst that was already searing his throat, and handed the canteen back to the woman.

She took it, clipped it to the belt under her poncho, and snapped her fingers in front of Zev’s face.

“Yeah—” Zev cleared his throat, and went on with an even raspier voice, “Yeah, I’m listening.”

The woman signed, _They need your tongue to bargain with the outlanders_.

Fascinating, how they signed ‘need’ on this planet. It was a different sign from ‘need’ as in simply ‘necessitate’, and carried a meaning of ‘need to borrow’.

“Okay,” Zev said. “I’m on my way. Just let me put my shoes on…” He almost pushed his short boots overboard as he groped for them, and gave up on trying to buckle them up as soon as he managed to stuff his feet back into them. By the time he’d limped to the landing pad with the woman’s help, his boots were full of sand.

A few techs were standing by the crewmembers, arms crossed in silence. The crewmembers, a male Zabrak, a female Rattataki and a male Human, were glaring at the techs and muttering among themselves.

“Hello,” Zev said, trying to stand a little bit firmer on his own legs. The sand in his boots grated against the soles of his feet at every motion.

Three pairs of sullen eyes turned to him. “Thirty creds,” the Human growled, “ _hello_ is the only Basic word this savage speaks.” His companions let out a brief, forced chuckle.

“I’m from the Inner Rim, actually,” Zev retorted. He signed _thank you_ and _let go_ to the village woman, and steeled himself to avoid falling to the ground as soon as she complied.

“Oh,” said the Human, his dour expression mellowing. “Sorry. Still kinda getting used to, ah, new things.”

“He used to be an Imp,” the Rattataki woman said, earning herself a sideways look from the Human. “That’s why he’s an asshole. But he’s trying to get better.”

“Let’s get to the point,” cut in the Zabrak man, perhaps the captain. “We need a refuel. And repairs to the stabilizer. Our ship took a few bad knocks up the Kessel Run. Heard the folks on this planet run a coaxium refinery, so I figured you guys could help—we can reach an agreement on the price.”

The Zabrak leaned in to watch as Zev started signing a translation to the Savarians. After some back-and-forth about the mechanics and haggling on the money, the techs got to work.

“That’s not Basic Sign Language, is it?” the Zabrak captain observed at last.

“Nope,” Zev answered. “They made it up themselves.”

“Why? Did the Empire test some bio-weapon here—”

The Human snorted.

“—that rotted away their vocal chords?”

“My people did that to another clan a while ago,” the Rattataki woman mused. “Long story of poetic justice.”

“No, it was Crimson Dawn.” Zev cast a look at the techs at work. The woman from the pier was gone, he hadn’t noticed when. But he knew they were being watched. And listened to. “The locals tried to rebel against their incursions, so Crimson Dawn cut off their tongues as punishment. I understand Savarians weren’t very chatty even before that, but…” He coughed a few times. Speaking was tiresome, and his throat was so dry. “You know. The sort of things that change you.”

“Ah.”

“I heard they make good brandy,” the Rattataki woman said.

Zev gestured towards the huts at the top of the seashore slope. “Bar’s that way. You won’t have to sign with the ‘tender.” A stab reached his numb heart. They wouldn’t have needed him to interpret with the techs, either, for the techs understood spoken Basic perfectly. The younger villagers had even been born _after_ the tongue-cutting incident. They’d all played ball so that Zev could step in, do something and feel useful, because they were kind people. And he was a burden onto them. Their kindness, once again, reminded him he ought to die as soon as possible.

The Rattataki woman looked at the Zabrak man, who shrugged. “Eh, why not. Let’s squander what’s left of our savings. Guard the ship, buckethead.”

“Yessir,” the Human said, so martial that a shiver ran down Zev’s spine. Then he added, “But bring a drink for me when you get back, pretty please?”

The Rattataki woman waved a hand at him as she and the Zabrak slogged uphill, sand whirling around their boots.

“So,” the ex-stormtrooper said, “where in the Inner Rim you from?”

“Denon.”

Lower, “Were you a soldier, too?”

Zev ran a hand over his grimy, stubbly cheek, the sunburned skin painful and hot at the touch. “Do I look that much like one?”

“Well, no. Yes? A bit. Thought your face was kind of familiar.”

Zev didn’t need to ask where he’d gotten that familiarity. From recruitment posters that used his father’s likeness, back when he was closer to Zev’s age. Did that mean Zev was growing up— _aging_ up to resemble his father more and more, too? Possible. His mother had said so, towards the beginning of that last holocall they’d had after she had been revived. _Good Goddesses, Maxie. He looks just like you_. Zev had spent the subsequent few standard weeks wanting to claw his Veers face off, and avoiding to stare at his own reflection in the mirror when he shaved.

He didn’t care that much anymore. But shit, he’d have sworn the beard and moustache were doing a better camouflage job.

“Where did you jump ship?” he asked the ex-stormtrooper. Might as well make him a bit uncomfortable in return.

“Tatooine. Soon as my captain got the news from Jakku, she rallied my company in the barracks yard and we figured it was going to be some inspirational speech on duty and honor and fighting to the death—but nope, she’d made a deal with the Red Key Company, to sell us all to them as slave labor for their desert mining operations. I barely managed to fuck off to the spaceport and stow away off-world.”

Zev nodded throughout the story. He had no idea what had happened at Jakku, nor what the Red Key Company was, and he didn’t feel like asking.

“Well, stow away on a shuttle that was being stolen.” The ex-stormtrooper smiled and shook his head. “It was a rocky start, but we’re a good team now, Captain Dolos and Apate and I. Like a family.”

“Cool.”

“You know how we bucketheads are. Social animals. Without camaraderie, we can’t go far.”

“Yeah.”

“Were you a trooper?”

“Nope. Navy.”

“Blast!” Chuckling, the ex-stormtrooper made a shooing gesture.

“Sorry to disappoint.” He meant it, as ridiculous as he knew it was. Couldn’t help meaning it.

“No worries, sailor boy. What’s your story? How did you wind up here?”

At the beginning of his desertion, Zev had had a readymade answer to that question. Nobody had ever asked him but he’d rehearsed it in his quarters countless times; not a word of it remained in his mind now. Instead, he saw again his parents in that last holocall. His mother, so alike the dead mom Zev had jealously preserved in his memory it was impossible to shake off the feeling it was all a terrible prank.

“Touchy question, huh?” said the ex-stormtrooper.

Zev blinked, tried to look him in the eyes for longer than a few seconds, failed. It was getting hard to keep his heavy eyelids raised.

“You don’t have to tell—”

“No, no, it’s fine. I just got a little distracted. It was after Endor. Everyone of my shipmates and their tooka was planning desertion. My best friend went home to Kalevala, or Werda, I’m not sure.”

The ex-stormtrooper made a face. “There’s a civil war raging in the Mandalore sector. Leave those brutes alone for five minutes and they’ll start wrecking up each other’s poodoo. I reckon your pal hasn’t found much of a home left.”

“I know. He warned me it would be best if I didn’t follow him.” Zev could keep neither the hurt nor a fresh acid whiff of vomit off his voice. He cleared his throat, gathered the reflux and spat it out in the sand.

“Why not going back to Denon, though?” asked the ex-stormtrooper.

Zev kept his eyes down.

“It’s still a loyal world, from what I heard.”

 _And you’re still a brain-washed buckethead_. An impulse to whip around and punch the ex-stormtrooper in the bare face burned through Zev, then fizzled out, leaving him with a locked jaw and a clenched fist. “I don’t have anyone there,” he said through his gritted teeth.

“Ah. Sorry, kid.”

Zev had seen his own reflection in a brandy glass, and knew he resembled much more a hobo than a kid. But maybe, by some desert mirage, the ex-stormtrooper had caught a glimpse of the orphaned eleven-standards-old in him, just like the propaganda face of General Veers. It made Zev want to hide. Scrub his face off into the sand, sink to the heavy darkness under the ocean.

“Others went to Taris,” Zev said. “I tried to tag along, but it’s a big city over there.”

“Didn’t you have a rendezvous point?”

“ _They_ did.”

The ex-stormtrooper stopped asking questions. For several seconds there was just the whoosh of the wind, the rustle of waves and the strident, hammering noises of the techs working on the shuttle. Zev sat down cross-legged, his head swimming and eyes full of light. Sand had trickled out of his boots at the ankles.

The ex-stormtrooper crouched to sit next to him. “You know, when the captain told us to gather in the yard… she said we had to leave our weapons and armors inside. So that we’d be easy to overpower for the Red Key goons, of course, but we didn’t know. We hoped it meant we were about to be demobilized.”

Zev wondered how much of it was truth, and how much a pity-milking story concocted by an Imp who wanted to save his skin in a Rebel galaxy. Either way, he didn’t care. He wanted to lie down and sleep forever. Or have another drink. He settled for letting his eyes drop closed.

The wind seeped into his skull and made too much noise for him to fall asleep. The HoloNet terminal in his quarters, his shaking hands as he checked the news feed after Bertolt at the mess hall had asked him about his old man, why he’d retired from the armed forces, had he pissed Lord Vader off but was too popular for summary execution? His parents snuggling on the living room couch on Denon, happy without him. A child who wasn’t him slept in his bed hugging his bantha plushie—the one he’d thrown at his grandparents after mom’s funeral, then ripped to shreds. He felt sorry to the verge of crying for the bantha plushie. His grandparents—their angry voices outside the closed door—they were right to be angry at him.

Now that he was gone, they would all be happier. He couldn’t muster any rage at his mother for siding with his father. An Imperial of the worst kind. Well, okay, not the _worst_. Zev was drunk and beyond caring enough to admit it, nowadays. In a comparative perspective, General Veers was a standard-fare dirt-pounder among the sickos wearing the skins of dead Wookiees, the Grand Moffs blowing up an entire Core World as an act of intimidation, the fiends incinerating cities from orbit over some pro-Rebel graffiti in a back alley. Still, _less bad_ didn’t make him a _good_ man. That made his mother not a good woman, too.

Small surprise if he, coming from this stock, was a little shit nobody wanted to have around. He saw Bertolt in his clan’s Mandalorian armor, the young officers in tunics without insignia, all sprinting down a Star Destroyer corridor that then turned into a rainy, dirty city street that reeked of trash. They all left him behind without a word of goodbye.

Tears prickled at the corners of his eyes, and Zev didn’t know if it was his real body or his dream one that wanted to cry.

Cold seawater splashed over his face, the salt burning on his skin. He came to his senses coughing and sputtering, his nose full of water. Found himself lying on his back, a Savarian tech with an upturned mess-tin in her right hand and a hydrospanner in her left standing over him, blocking the sunlight.

“He says he owes you thirty credits,” the tech said. She stayed there until Zev had hauled himself to a sitting position, then walked away. Just in time for Zev to bend over and puke some more of the earlier liquid courage into the sand where the tech’s boots had left prints smeared with engine lubricant.

He breathed a few times afterwards, until he was sure the floodgates were closed. Wiping the seawater off his sunburned face tore a pained grunt out of his raw throat.

The darker blast scorches on the shuttle’s fins had faded to grey. One of the fore cannons was gone. The Rattataki woman, the Zabrak man and the ex-stormtrooper were standing by the ramp; Zev raised his hand, and the ex-stormtrooper ran to him.

“Hey, kid. So you do have some friends left in this galaxy, eh?”

Zev stared at him, his brain emptier than a drunk-up bottle but his heart speeding up.

“That tech who tipped you off on the creds I owe you. I betted nobody here spoke Basic, remember?” The ex-stormtrooper took Zev’s hand, placed a credit chip on his palm and closed his fist over it. Didn’t let go yet. “I hate getting preachy, but… try not to spend it all on drinks, ‘kay? Buy yourself a change of clothes, some food. Soap, a razor.”

“Okay.”

“Notice I didn’t mention a ride home.”

“It’s not enough money for a passage to Denon, yeah.”

The ex-stormtrooper shook his head and squeezed Zev’s hand tighter. “As far as home goes, this place and these people ain’t bad for you. You’ve found your family, kid. Just as I did mine.”

The shuttle engine whirred into life. The Zabrak man was nowhere to be seen, presumably in the cockpit; the Rattataki woman stood half-way up the ramp, looking in their direction, hands on her utility belt, fingertips tapping on the butt of a holstered blaster.

“May the Force be with you, kid. Don’t give me that look, nobody’s ratting us out to the ISB for saying that anymore.” The ex-stormtrooper let go of Zev’s hand, turned and strode to the shuttle. His legs walked with the strut of a buckethead.

The ex-stormtrooper and the Rattataki woman entered the hold, but the ramp didn’t close completely even as the engine revved up and the shuttle took off.

It soared and spread its fins, then sailed out above the sea at a slow speed and constant altitude; Zev hadn’t been the best at judging distances in flight even when he wasn’t a drunkard, but he figured it was no more than five-hundred meters high. The captain must be testing out the ship’s systems before heading out of the goo and into the black.

A dark dot plummeted off the open strip of ramp. A four-limbed, flailing dot. It hit the water and disappeared. Zev’s heart jumped to his throat.

The ramp sealed itself shut, the shuttle sped up and was gone into the rolling clouds. The waves splashed, the wind blew, a few sea eagles dived to peck and claw at the water where the dark dot had fallen. Zev was afraid of breathing. Of letting the sea know it had taken the wrong life.

His hand clasped the credit chip so tight he didn’t feel when it slipped off. He patted around in the sand, breaking the fearful spell or the grief or whatever had immobilized him. There it was, fine sand grains in the grooves, starbird crest etched onto the front side. His mouth and throat were parched; time for another drink.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Grapefruit Moon_ by Tom Waits.
> 
> Dolos and Apate are the names of two ancient Greek personifications of deceit.


End file.
